This is blog which contains my achievement in masters. I will try to put all the information I got from the university in chronological order.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Looking for intelligence

We can see many types of software installed within our computer. The installed software varies from just calculating values to doing something similar to human brains. I have a game program “Chess Titans” which came with operating system “Windows 7” which plays with human just like another human is playing. If a machine completely calculates and searches all the states, then, it can’t be said it is doing with complete intelligence. If computer checks all the states and then performs steps, it is true that we never beat computer because it has thousands times calculation capacity and has power to think hundreds of steps ahead which is out of reach to us. But, in contrast, we can beat computer chess program if we play logically. So, “Chess Titans” plays intelligently with human so that it doesn’t always win human.

Not only this, there are many applications which, we don’t notice, but are doing their task intelligently. For example: google search. The supplied search keywords are manipulated by google using some sort of intelligence. It tracks all search patterns, then it suggests the most optimized keyword for searching. Also, google has achieved its popularity in the field of language translation. The feature of auto identification of the language and translating the text from one language to another language includes lots of intelligence tasks and google is success to achieve this. Similarly, word processing program of Microsoft is also implementing the intelligence while typing a word. If the word is mistaken, then it replaces it with appropriate word.

The implementation of intelligence in computer is an undergoing process and we can get more and more applications implementing intelligence to make our tasks more sophisticated. I think if computer implements voice recognition system and performs tasks by the commands provided by speaking, then it would be great achievement. The computer receives the voice signal, interprets the voice and then does respective action. Voice of different person (frequency, loudness etc.) is different, so computer should learn the command to interpret the command. There would be one problem: the same word is pronounced differently, so it may take longer time to learn perfectly and then it would be very easy, we don’t need to type any word in keyboard, just stay in front of computer and speak! It would not be very difficult if commands are provided in only one language. The sentence structure of the language and how the words are pronounced may affect the complexity of the development of the voice recognition system. These activities lie on natural language processing, a broad field of artificial intelligence.

My area of interest in intelligence includes the field of computer vision. Actually, I have started a small project which manipulates the face images to identify a person. Although, it is based on mathematical calculations, I have implemented some intelligent algorithms to identify a person by his face. The central task of that project was image analysis and pattern recognition. The PCA (principle component analysis) algorithm was used to extract the information of the components of face like mouth, eye, nose etc. The application, first of all carries out processes from a set of faces, and then extracts information and stores it. Then, when a new face is provided, it compares with the previously stored information. Then it identifies the face by calculating the difference of the stored face information and newly fetched face.

The project is almost complete except I have not integrated the learning module in the application. If there is new face, and machine recognizes the face, then it should update with the information of newly recognized face i.e. the machine should be capable of learning new things. The learning module development may be challenging, but if I have a plenty of time, I will research on that topic so that I can implement the learning module and my application will work perfectly. This includes a broad area of artificial intelligence: Machine Learning.